The racist within

Assuming I actually make it up to Edinburgh tomorrow, I’m a little concerned that I’ll have to deal with James’ racist past. Are people going to assume I’m racist? Am I going to have to apologise?

This is particularly important because on Monday we’re on Radio Scotland (again, in James’ case), and I can’t help feeling that it will come up. I reckon I have three options:

Claim it only applies to men

The section in question is the rules of The Fit Scotsman Contest, a game that James and some other people who like Scotsmen, or at least men, played while we were performing An Extremely Memorable Emergency. Although the actual sentence talks about ‘Scottish people’, that has to be taken in context.

Not go

I could just not turn up. I missed an interview with Edinburgh Evening News because I’d been up all night fixing stuff for work after what I can only describe as a power girder (in that it was twenty foot long and the width of my leg) blew up. Given the current plot to overthrow the government by refusing to let people take anything on plane journeys that might while away the tedium, I think I could come up with a pretty good excuse for simply not showing.

Lie

“I never saw that. It must have been inserted by the copy editor.”

It’s probably not a good idea to go with the first option, because we’re being interviewed by two men. I assume they’re Scottish, it being the Scottish national radio station. The second option might annoy James as he’s already flat out publicising and performing his own show.

By the way, no matter what Ken Smith of The Herald writes, the description of Scots as irredeemably ugly doesn’t come under “fleeting amorous relationships” – it’s not even in the index as such, although frankly now it’s been pointed out I can’t believe we didn’t put that in. It would fit well next to “Fit Scotsman contest”.